weening@Gang-of-Four.Stanford.EDU (Joe Weening) (09/19/88)
In article <13609@mimsy.UUCP>, chris@mimsy (Chris Torek) writes: >>In article <3470@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: >>... >>but let me point out that this whole folk etymology Knuth goes through, >>greek letters and other such nonsense to steer clear of a Honeywell >>product, > >Why assume that the purpose is `to steer clear of a Honeywell product'? In fact it isn't. Knuth hadn't heard of the Honeywell product when he created TeX in 1977-78, but was told about it afterwards and felt obliged to note the distinction in the TeXbook. In the old TeX manual ("TeX: a system for technical text", part 2 of TeX and METAFONT, New Directions in Typesetting, Digital Press, 1979), the last paragraph of chapter 1 (that in the TeXbook describes the Honeywell system) reads: "On the other hand you might find it more comfortable to pronounce TeX as a Texan would and to shrug off all this high-falutin' nonsense about beauty and quality. Go ahead and do what you want, the computer won't mind." >>... in [any] case the "it's all Greek" shaggy dog story is extraneous, no? > >Partly. Note that TeX is written in WEB, and WEB is translated to TeX >by `weave'. The Greek `teknologos' (if I have not mangled it too badly), >a computer word if there ever was one, is spelled tau-epsilon-chi-etc. >But the Latin imperative form of `to weave' is spelled `texe'! Neat! The name "weave" was chosen long after "TeX", but I wouldn't be surprised if this had something to do with it. By the way, we're now past the 10th anniversary of (the original) TeX, and Don Knuth has marked the occasion by writing a paper describing the history of TeX. Look for it soon as a Stanford Computer Science Department tech report. -- Joe Weening Computer Science Dept. weening@Gang-of-Four.Stanford.EDU Stanford University